One's Own Right

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With Privign pushed to the brink of disaster, and new threats revealed, two thirds of the Beloved Dust take measures to evacuate the station. While ⸢Signet⸣ works to protect and preserve the history of the first third generation divine, Tender Sky digs into the surprising history of something much more foreign. And on The Sky Reflected In Mirrors, Fourteen Fifteen adapts to their new body and listens to a special message.

Hey. Satellite. I've been looking over the data you sent me with your latest scans from Quire. I, uh, I didn't see anything to be worried about, at first. But I ran them through the history, just on a whim, and, well. There isn't an exact match to anything we need to be worried about, but there are echoes. Or, not echoes, not even traces. Crumbs.

And. I've just been thinking about the observers who did this last time. The ones in charge. Of stopping Independence? I just, what if they had all the pieces they needed, and they just missed something. Or what if something broke down? I just have all this information in front of me, and you're constantly gathering more, and I just worry, because there are so many points of failure, and all of them come back to us. And the stakes are so high, Satellite.

I. I've been thinking. Maybe you're right. And I know K-Upside can hear this, and I want them to. There's too much at risk to put this on two people. Even when one of them can do what you can, Gray. There are too many variables. Too many actors. And, well, frankly, the people here in the fleet know them better than we do. I think it's time to--

Tender goes next door to storage where Mother’s Story’s ship is. Tender hacks into the ship. Fold-down holo projector that spritzes out gas displays information for her.[1] She learns Mother's Story's mission objectives. First, she is here for Independence. She has scans that say it passed this way, and can find where it landed using the gem scanner. Second, she must destroy any scans or backups of Independence made by the gem scanner. Still, most people on Earth don’t care about this at all. The Fleet is nothing to them. The New Earth Hegemony is an embodiment of the “great promise” of late capitalism.[2]

Fourteen is at their apartment, on the top floor of a tall tower block with only a few families living inside it. They look around their apartment. A marching band is playing from the radio.[3]

Fourteen hears and see a message from a stream suppressor, like Gig's but not his. There are six people in black and silver satin uniforms with fold-over panels. A few people are wearing bandannas. One is Robin's Song, Morning's Observation's brother. The one who’s speaking is Open Metal. She calls herself the Commandant of Sui Juris, "one's own right". She calls for the end of the Divine Fleet's partnership with divines and demands that executive power be given to Sui Juris on the By-and-By. She reveals that they have kidnapped the Cadent.[4]

“My name is Open Metal. I am the Commandant of the reform group known as Sui Juris. If you work long hours to provide for your fellow citizens, you may know us. If you carefully scrutinize the stories fed to the fleet by Empyrean, then you may know us. If you are a patriot and a scholar of history, then you may know us. But if you do not know us, then fear not: because we know you.

I speak on behalf of every citizen who swears allegiance to the Resonant Orbit, for every member of this so-called Divine Fleet. If you are a person and you hear this, then I speak in defense of you.

What I am about to say will be hard to hear, but vital to understand: we are, whether we’d like to or not, leaving now the Age of Divines and returning to a galaxy, driven not by the whims of machine gods, but by the hard work, political action, and driving willpower of people. It is time that we admit that the Divine Fleet was a naive experiment. A long one, yes. One that produced much joy for its small population, certainly. But it—we—have only ever been a small splash in the ocean of the stars.

And in the end, our faith in the Divines has, at best, led us to stray from our duty as members of a galactic community, and at worst, resulted in the deaths of millions of people, synthetic and organic both. But just as Empyrean should not be allowed to unilaterally make decisions about what comes next for all of us, neither should I. You are the people in power. Where we go from here is up to you. And so it is my job to make sure that you hold the reins of control in your hands. To that end, effective immediately, the seat of power in this fleet will be stripped from Seance and turned over to the By and By, a ship which contains a meaningful majority of the Fleet’s total population. To that end, and to ensure a calm and orderly transfer of power, we have taken the Cadent Under Mirage into our protective custody.”

And then the camera, which is installed into a member of this group, it trembles and turns to reveal her, the Cadent. She’s sitting on a sort of throne between two people with guns, they’re in kind of a fancy looking meeting room.

Then the cameraman turns away and looks out across a balcony and a sort of long forest below, and a massive window in the distance, revealing the view from the top of the By and By.

And then Open Metal steps back into frame, and she spreads her arms, and she says,

“The Age of Divines is over. Welcome to the Age of Sui Juris. The Age of One’s Own Right.”

”

Signet and Iluna enter the core access room, a mirrored, circular room with a plush chair within which sits a deactivated robotic body, the last excerpt of Privign. The excerpt's last report plays; at the same time, Acre Seven and Waltz manage to enable communication to the Beloved's ship and the Fleet. Iluna gives Signet the core.[5]

Tender picks up radio signals from the Sky Reflected in Mirrors about the Cadent being kidnapped. Everyone heads to the By-and-By, including Fourteen, who is trying to charter a fishing vessel.[6]

Messalia is using their mech, Melodica, to attack the Iconoclast. Signet tries to interrupt but is grabbed by the Iconoclast. Signet imagines three peaceful scenes, and focuses on the most personal one, which startles the Iconoclast so much it can't let go of the ship and stops taking the colors of Benthos. The Iconoclasts now have a component on Signet.[7]

Signet learns that three groups survived the cataclysm of Independence: the group from the Sky Reflected in Mirrors, the Independents, and the servants Independence for itself--the Iconoclasts. The Iconoclasts explored space and found the Divine Fleet. They were inspired to build its antithesis: a living factory of Divines with no connection to humanity. Volition, the fifth moon of Quire.[8]

Signet asks Melodica to fire, and Melodica uses its shoulder cannons to attack the Iconoclast. The ships all head toward the By-and-By and Quire.[9]

Satellite here, Primary. I have bad news. Both Crystal Palace and Privign missed something in their predictions. The Annihilation-Class being Independence just entered our system, as expected, but an unexpected solar storm pushed it out of an impact vector with the planet Benthos.

It looks like. It looks like it's headed towards what we have down as the Quire system, now? I used to be one of these observation decks. Out near Quire. They moved me here. There's no known galactic-scale power there. There's no Fleet. There's no Principality. There's no Hegemony. There's nothing.

I think that that means that this has been a failure, Primary. I have been here for nearly 800 years. Do you understand? I sacrificed my flesh to be here, Primary. I could have stayed on cycle. I could have lived a normal life. I could have been a mechanic, or a florist, or I could have been a postman. I could have been like you. I could have just been a regular. Just been a regular agent.

I gave up everything so that I could stop this thing in its tracks, and we failed, because of an unanticipated solar flare? A solar flare that Crystal Palace says it couldn't expect? Crystal Palace, who expects everything? And now I'm wondering: hey, what if it could expect it? What if all the way back on Kesh, Crystal Palace saw this coming and sent us anyway? It saw this too, and saw us failing, and we're just one more link in the chain. In the chain fence protecting the citizens on cycle.

The monks here, the ones that call me Excerpt, they don't even. Care. They just keep on collecting rocks, they just. They just keep collecting rocks. And Privign, who is the only person here remotely like me. Privign's not dead. But they're not speaking. They've gone silent. The only one who knows what it's like to be like this. Privign won't say a thing.

And you know what? I think he has the right idea. I'm gonna go quiet too. Uh, I know that Crystal Palace is a heartless machine, Primary, but you know what? Tell it to go fuck itself. Tell everybody else that I'm sorry.